I’ve touched on RedDeer Games, or RedDeer.Games, before, namely in the Midnight Works article. But I’m going to rag on them specifically because they’ve perfected a method of crapping up the eShop, especially the version on Switch. You see, on the Switch eShop, a bundle of the game and DLC is counted as a new game. Nintendo has done a decent job of filtering them out of the Web eShop, but the Switch eShop is the Wild West. SwitchStars has done a video on them where he says, at the time of the video release, that RedDeer Games is most prolific publisher on the eShop, constituting 3% of the total games released. I believe it.
The most insidious thing about the practice is that the bundles are the exact same packages repackaged over and over again. The Complete and Definitive versions of Hentai Golf above are the exact same bundles, but counted as a new game. RedDeer Games really has no shame, though if you think about it, there’s a logic here. If you keep releasing the same game over and over, it keeps it at the top of the heap and never sinks into gaming slush pile, never to be seen again.
RedDeer Games isn’t alone
But if you thought RedDeer was alone in this, you’d be wrong. Baltoro is also notorious for this, among others. Though in Baltoro’s defense, the games they keep releasing tend to be of a higher quality often than RedDeer Game’s stock, and generally released at a slower rate.
Nintendo needs to fix the Switch eShop, it is damn near unusable at this point, and the bundles are a huge portion of the reason why. But here’s the thing, they wouldn’t be doing this if it did not work, Still, like all the other scams, asset flips and AI generated garbage, this stuff clogs up the eShop, and pushes the worthwhile indie games off the page. Its gotten so bad I have to rely on Keymailer to find worthwhile games to review, unless I stumble on something like Epyx Rogue. RedDeer Games and the others won’t stop unless Nintendo changes the eShop, but at this point, I wouldn’t hold my breath. Probably it’ll only change when the Switch 2 comes out.
P.S. Read my rant on Aldora Games, who produce garbage visual novels that clog up the eShop
